The New Torture Memo: Democracy on a Waterboard

The most important document anyone's pried loose recently is the one that's up right now at Noah Shachtman and Spencer Ackerman's joint. In this memo, written in 2006 by Philip Zelikow, an adviser to then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Zelikow tells his boss that what we were doing to many of the terrorist suspects we'd gathered up around the world amounted to a "felony war crime." The memo is also a fascinating glimpse into how pursuing a program of torture twisted up the institutions of government here until their functions were unrecognizable. Here we have the State Department warning the Department of Justice that its conclusions about what was permissible under U.S. law were the merest moonshine. I swear to god, we are all lucky to have outlived these clowns.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

Zelikow is an interesting case. He is forever having serious doubts about things, but rarely ever actually does anything about them. He was appointed executive director of the 9/11 Commission, and reviews of his performance there are decidedly mixed. Taking phone calls from Karl Rove while you're allegedly conducting an independent review of an event to which screw-ups by Rove's boss and your own were so central was probably not a good idea. Whatever "felony war crimes" he believed were being committed at the time he wrote this memo, they apparently weren't serious enough to quit over, much less bring to light.

Most Popular

Nevertheless, he did write this memo, and it has now come to light, and it's a sorry-ass excuse for policy-making in an allegedly advanced political democracy. It blows up (yet again) the standard Bush Administration alibi that they thought they could do whatever they wanted to whomever they wanted because their pet DOJ lawyers told them it was okay, and also because, you know, 9/11! (Every one for your Republican candidates for president this year was pro-torture, too.) And it is a sorry-ass excuse for policy-making in an allegedly advanced political democracy no matter who's making the sorry-ass policy:

Zelikow's warnings about the legal dangers of torture went unheeded — not just by the Bush administration, which ignored them, but, ironically, by the Obama administration, which effectively refuted them. In June, the Justice Department concluded an extensive inquiry into CIA torture by dropping potential charges against agency interrogators in 99 out of 101 cases of detainee abuse. That inquiry did not examine criminal complicity for senior Bush administration officials who designed the torture regimen and ordered agency interrogators to implement it.

To quote Thomas Jefferson, who appears to be all the rage these days, "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever."